Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API. Notes on Go's newly accepted uuid proposal and the tradeoffs behind the API.

Humid air swirls with colorful spirits. They trace its invisible currents in spirals through open spaces, cling to branches, drip down stone faces and, awakened by the first beams of the rising sun, ooze newly out of trees like sap. Lulls of wind leave them gliding gently downward to be picked up again. From a distance, eddies of the spirits’ malleable confetti travel along plains. With translucent jellylike hands and fingers they wave at each other in passing or hold each other in breeze-pert...

Most anti-AI rhetoric is left-wing coded. Popular criticisms of AI describe it as a tool of techno-fascism , or appeal to predominantly left-wing concerns like carbon emissions , democracy , or police brutality . Anti-AI sentiment is surprisingly bipartisan , but the big anti-AI institutions are labor unions and the progressive wing of the Democrats. This has always seemed weird to me, because the contents of most anti-AI arguments are actually right-wing coded. They’re not nece...

For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eventually be able to crack the widely used codes that secure much of the digital world. To protect against this fate, they’ve spent years developing new codes that appear to be safe from future safecrackers armed with quantum computers. At the same time, they’ve also devised ingenious ways to use the rules of… Source For the past few decades, researchers have understood that quantum computers should eve...

Most scientists and programmers’ implicit model of belief is roughly Bayesian: when someone who believes something about the world receives new evidence, they update their beliefs in the way that fits that evidence best. This model is (mostly) true in domains that people aren’t invested in emotionally, but fails in predictable ways for beliefs that are tied to group membership. Research in social psychology has established that beliefs about contested political and social issues function p...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudo...

Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end x86 option (a Ryzen AI 5 340 Mainboard ), the fastest RISC-V option ( DC-ROMA II ), and today I'm publishing results from the only Arm Mainboard, the MetaComputing AI PC , which has a 12-core Arm SoC and up to 32 GB of soldered-on RAM. My Framework 13 has run on x86, RISC-V, and now Arm, making it something of a 'Ship of Theseus'. Using the repair-friendly Framework 13 laptop chassis, I've tested the low-end...

The proof of work is the wrong analogy: finding hash collisions, while exponentially harder with N, is guaranteed to find, with enough work, some S so that H(S) satisfies N, so an asymmetry of resources used will see the side with more "work ability" eventually winning. But bugs are different: 1. Different LLMs executions take different branches, but eventually the possible branches based on the code possible states are saturated. 2. If we imagine sampling the model for a bug in a given...

Path Robotics’ welding quadruped, via Nima Gard on Twitter . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at a quadruped welding robot, the China Shock 2.0, transformer startups, China’s mysteriously moving satellites, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. No essay this week, but working on a more involved piece about constru...

I tried Claude Design yesterday and I have a theory for how this whole thing shakes out. As product teams scaled and design needed to justify itself inside engineering orgs, it was pushed toward systematization — and Figma invented its own primitives to make that work: components, styles, variables, props, and so on. Some concepts are borrowed from programming, some aren’t, and the whole thing doesn’t neatly map onto anything. Guidance evolves, migrations pile up, and if you want to au...

We’re going back back to the Apollo era back to human eyes at Luna back to views of our blue marble and back to bombing its civilians Back to the horrors of Vietnam in the schools of Iran while lunar astronauts look back “for all humanity” We’re going back with a translunar injection burn while leveling buildings in Lebanon in that same duration We’re going back back to taking pains for ensuring lunar crew safety but not the missile precision that avoids civilian casualty We’re going...

Click to get it full-size front and back! I’m the guy who does “monsters on a business card” posts, and I just started at MCDM, so I should probably do a Draw Steel Monsters on a Business Card, right? Well it turns out I don’t have to! Amber over at amby.navy did it for me! If you’re new to DS, there are a lot of new terms here and it may look intimidating! Luckily, it’s all spelled out in a few pages in the introduction of Draw Steel: Monsters . (No reverse engineering req...

In the first lab note in this series, I introduced the task framework and motivated it with a few examples. In this note, I’ll give you a more concrete picture of the framework — the set of concepts you need to understand in order to use it — and walk you through its implementation. Cast of characters Each user has a pool of task workers that can run tasks from a set of task queues that user contributes work to. A task is a unit of work. It has some code to run, an optional i...

This talk was given at State of the Browser (2026) . Check out the event talk page (which includes a talk transcript, too). We’ll talk about best practices to either reduce (or increase!) the JavaScript footprint on your web site to a sweet and very practical spot for best results. It’s far more common to have too much JavaScript on your web site, but can you go too far? Is zero JavaScript a worthwhile goal? Let’s talk about it! Video Wa...

At Oxford I focused my research and discussions on how we can use the tools of computational complexity to help us understand the power and limitations of machine learning. Last week I posted my paper How Does Machine Learning Manage Complexity? , a first step in this direction. Let me give a broad overview of the paper. Please refer to the paper for more technical details. Instead of focusing on the machine learning concepts like neural nets, transformers, etc., I wanted to abstract out a mode...

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Gimkit Pro is the paid subscription tier for Gimkit educator accounts. It removes game mode restrictions, unlocks homework assignment tools, and lets teachers attach images and audio to questions. Every new educator account starts with a 14-day free trial before the plan reverts to Basic. Gimkit Pro vs Gimkit Basic: Key Differences Every educator gets Gimkit Basic for free with no expiry. Basic includes unlimited student participation per live session, class rostering, and performance ...

This year's PyCon US is coming up next month from May 13th to May 19th, with the core conference talks from Friday 15th to Sunday 17th and tutorial and sprint days either side. It's in Long Beach, California this year, the first time PyCon US has come to the West Coast since Portland, Oregon in 2017 and the first time in California since Santa Clara in 2013. If you're based in California this is a great opportunity to catch up with the Python community, meet a whole lot of interesting people...

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform manually. In the early 1960s, an automated system was developed for the B-52 bomber to automatically track stars and compute navigation information. Digital computers weren't suitab...

When is AI image slop ok? By Gordon Mclean Gordon stumbled across a post arguing that AI-generated featured images signals laziness, even if every word you write is your own, and it made him stop and think about his own blog. Read post ➡ This post piqued my interest, and surprise suprise, I have opinions. 🙃 I've spoken about my opinions on AI and image generation before and my opinion hasn't changed on that. I have, however, switched from ChatGPT to Claude, for reason...

0.0 Context Setting It’s Thursday, 16 April, 2026 and unseasonably cold in Portland, Oregon. Before that, it was unseasonably warm. This jackpot sucks. Oh right, there’s also a podcast feed for, uh, some podcast episodes. Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on LibSyn Things That Caught My Attention (The Podcast) on Apple Podcasts Let’s just get on with the thing that caught my attention. 1.0 Things That Caught My Attention 1.1 It’s (not) the economy, stupid...

Why not use a syntax highlighting library? These libraries take text as input and produce HTML as output. But on these interactive pages, the input is HTML. I have manually marked up the code with embedded interactive elements that respond to the reader's choices: The syntax highlighting libraries I looked at don't work on HTML out of the box. It's possible to merge two highlighters together but it can be tricky. Let's see what the merging looks like. To keep the examples concise...

WASHINGTON – (March 30, 2026) – Airbus U.S. Space & Defense, in partnership with Shield AI, L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX), and Parry Labs, completed its fourth autonomous flight test period on the H145 Airbus helicopter and successfully integrated all four company’s technologies into a single aircraft together for the first time. The test flights, which took place at the Airbus facility in Grand Prairie, Texas, focused on refining the aircraft’s perception system to ensure it provi...